Lara Stone, naked, is Stella McCartney’s new face

Rather than causing a dip in the amount of campaigns Lara Stone has appeared in of late, the birth of her son Alfred last year has actually scored her one of her most daring yet, as the new face — and body — of Stella McCartney's bestselling Stella fragrance. And if the imagery — in which she appears completely naked save for a few strategically placed bottles of the scent — is anything to go by, then her pregnancy hasn't had a particularly negative effect on that famous body either. In fact, McCartney is the first to say that motherhood has only enhanced the model's charms.

"Lara is perfect for this campaign as she is really young and has that innocence, but then she's just had a baby boy and so she has that bit of maturity. She seems almost fragile because she is naked, and a new mother, and she's barely wearing any make-up in the pictures. She's also really sexy, isn't she? Just gorgeous," McCartney told us over breakfast at Ladurée at Harrods, the room heavy with the smell of freshly-cut roses and of the French patisserie's famous rose macarons (although she admits that the salted caramel versions are her preferred choice). Shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, another image from the campaign sees the model's famously full lips and gapped teeth clasped around a miniature version of the bottle, whilst new, polka-dotted outer packaging reflects McCartney's brand logo.

"Lara just has this iconic mouth. I'm not immersed in the world of beauty so I don't know the 'rules' as such — I just thought let's put a little bottle in Lara Stone's mouth, spray it with water and it'll look really sexy," McCartney told us, revealing that baby Alfred had joined the team on the shoot. "We all just had fun. You want the right girl and the right energy, and Lara is perfect. I like to work with models I genuinely admire as people as well as just because they're beautiful."

The fragrance itself may not be new, in fact it launched over a decade ago, but McCartney says that she hopes that her determination to stick to what she loved — namely the central rose notes of the scent — is what has made it so enduring.

"When I was creating the fragrance I was told that rose was very unfashionable and that nobody at all in the perfume industry was using it at that time," she told us, leaning to inhale the scent of the blooms at the centre of our table. "I was like: 'It's a bit late now!'. I mean, I grew up on an organic farm, so my references were gardens — that's what I thought of when I thought of scent. When we created it, the world was stuck in an obsession with celebrity fragrances — it was all a bit flash-in-the-pan. I used to get headaches when people would come up to me. So I really wanted to bring out something that had a timelessness."

The new-look Stella Eau de Parfum is available in Harrods now, priced from £42, and nationwide from August.